>Better advice comes from things people actually did.
What happens when it takes quite a bit more focused effort to do something like not be on "social" media than it does to idle along with the mainstream?
The line is pretty blurry to begin with, and can be a moving target making it hard to know for sure whether you are doing, not doing, or being done :)
For example, Gil Amelio—former CEO of Apple—once expressed that he wanted to be reborn as a woman owning/working a vineyard in Southern France. That was so specific and interesting, I still remember it.
Wishing you used social media less doesn't exactly spark the imagination.
BTW: Yes, I know he's still alive :)
I still go around quoting: No one at their deathbed says "Man, I wish I had spent more time at the office!"
On the flip side, I've noticed the older one is, the longer their list is of "things that don't matter." (e.g. Don't focus so much on wealth, career, etc). It was years before I realized that I've encountered very old people who say "None of it matters", and that perhaps they are not giving sage advice, but are merely changing preferences as they age.
May we all get to enjoy those final moments free of the need to perform on stage and express those things we truly wish to pass on to those will hear them.
HN discussed that a few months ago and the most upvoted commenter happened to have a terminal illness and disagreed with some of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944467
He recently passed away a few months ago in August 2025. That's one of the few HN threads I bookmarked because he had a contrarian opinion that I agreed with.
Of course nowadays we have memes to help us completely avoid thinking at all. Ask someone what is best in life, and see how far you get!
Only rarely does one get a considered response. That would be a response that
1) Acknowledges existing thought on the issue. "Socrates mentions regret..." "The mongols thought the open steppe was very important for the good life"
2) Adds personal experience. This can be totally banal, since we don't all live exceptional lives. "I met a girl at the bakery in 1975..." But being banal doesn't mean you can't use the experience to reflect on what regrets actually are, and whether you agree with some POV.
With someone on their deathbed I guess it can be a bit jarring to subject them to the full Oxford tutorial grilling, so I can understand why it can end up being a bit bland.
There is no moment in our lives where we can be trusted to think deeply and express a hard to hear honest thought, and those people that do it often when talking about others are just mean and unlikeable.
I would often do general consulting while mainly helping with tech, marketing or sales... and I noticed that all of my most important advice no one would follow. It got so extreme that I would often joke that "I know my advice is good because no one ever takes it". David Maister acknowledged a similar thing in his book "Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy"
This article strikes a chord of course because its right in line with that thought. Deathbed regrets in that sense are kind of cheap - they knew what they were doing and did it anyway. I think the author is however missing a key feature of this genre though - those regrets are almost always things that are there, that have no deadline and are easily delayed. Spending time with family, working on hobbies or creative pursuits, and so on. What the regretters are failing to attribute is their lack of discipline... and that there is a valuable take away. The genre could really be just a derivative of: "I wish I had been more disciplined in my life"
reactordev•1h ago
Not discounting it. There’s comfort in knowing you aren’t alone or the only one to make mistakes, we all do. What’s healthy is realizing it was a mistake, know what you did that caused it, learn from it, and not have it happen again due to a change of behavior. In work, and in life.
Also, life is short, forgiveness is hard, time goes by faster than you think.